


A Golden Crown

by canyouseemyspark



Series: Dorne [6]
Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
Genre: F/M, First Time, Future Fic, Prompt Fic, Sexual Content
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-15
Updated: 2013-02-15
Packaged: 2017-11-29 08:44:55
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,656
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/685049
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/canyouseemyspark/pseuds/canyouseemyspark
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>For the <a href="http://http://got-exchange.livejournal.com/">got-exchange</a> prompt: Myrcella/Trystane, 5+1. Five moments when he tried to say I love you, and the first time he did.</p><p><i>"He stepped down, trying not to look long at her, as if she were the sun, yet he saw her, like the sun, even without looking"</i> - Leo Tolstoy</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Golden Crown

**Author's Note:**

> Trigger warning for a short scene when includes prostitution.

1.

They kiss for the first time with their feet in the sand, warm water surrounding them. The sea was always Myrcella’s favorite place. She said it was because she had never been allowed to spend long in the waters of Blackwater Bay, the strong currents deemed too dangerous for a princess. Trystane thought her preference for the outdoors had something more to do with the looks in her handmaidens’ eyes, the thinly veiled pity tempered with disgust, something to do with the gifts she received from the other ladies, veils too thick to see through, scented poultices from the Citadel, and powders from the Free Cities meant to cover blemishes – except Myrcella did not suffer from mere blemishes and there was no mixture strong enough to the heal the wound which sliced across her face, running diagonally from forehead to jaw, red and angry.

The sight of it had frightened him at first but he was only a boy then and now he was a man of fifteen and his pretty friend who was smarter and more wicked than him was beautiful no longer but still smart and still wicked, sadder sometimes but otherwise unchanged. Though the boys he spent his childhood growing beside were scattered all over Dorne, serving as pages and squires, sailing the Sunset Sea and touring the Free Cities, Trystane remained in the Water Gardens, waiting for something he did not know or understand but which hung over him all the same.

That day, Myrcella wore a simple green silken gown and held it up to keep the fabric out of the water’s reach, her slippers lying far away in the sand. Trystane swung his boots from their laces in his hands, his breeches rolled up to his knees, his skin dark beside hers, so white it was already reddening from the harsh glare of the sun.

She waited, he supposed, until the septa grew tired of the heat and walked away, seeking refuge beneath the shade of a laurel tree, so far out of sight that Trystane and Myrcella would have seemed to her to be nothing but two black dots on the horizon. She waited, as he knew she would, and pushed him clumsily into the water as she had so many times when they were younger, laughing all the while.

He sat up clumsily and shook his hair so that fat drops of water littered the front of her dress. She shrieked when he kicked her legs out from under her and landed beside him, a mess of white limbs and golden hair. The water was shallow enough that she could lay on her side with her head propped up in the palm of her hand, resting her weight on a bent elbow, half-submerged in the water.

“You look like a mermaid,” He joked, and she did, the dress clinging so tightly to her legs it might have been a tail, strands of golden hair floating gracefully on the surface of the water.

“What would that make you?” Myrcella replied, giggling.

“A kraken, I suppose,” He joked, though she only scrunched her nose at that. He tried again, “Or a pirate.”

“A pirate captured by a mermaid and pulled into the water,” She added.

Trystane grinned, “Mermaids are cruel things, born of grief. I have heard it said they are the spirits of women who have murdered their lovers, and only when they have consumed the blood of adrift sailors are they able to turn into humans once again.”

“Maybe their lovers deserved their fate,” Myrcella retorted, “Perhaps you deserve yours.”

“Am I your lover then?” He asked teasingly.

She looked abashed for only a moment before she sat up, cradling his face in her hands and pressing her lips against his. Her lips tasted of saltwater and were soft, even at the very edge where the blade made its mark. He reached for her instinctively, feeling a hazy desire to press his body against hers, resting his hand on her shoulder to pull her closer. Something strange and heavy settled between them instead and for a foolish moment he wondered if her tale was true, for he felt himself sinking, paralyzed, reveling in delight even as he drowned. Myrcella broke the kiss suddenly.  
  
She was not his after all, though their families had said some words, exchanged promises. He was no Viper like his cousins, not cunning like his sister, and more like his father than he liked to admit and no match for a lion, even tamed, even sleeping. In a few years when her brother had his throne secured, she would be sent back to King’s Landing, he told himself, married to someone else. She was not his, he thought.

She stood up, splashing him once more before running across the sand. As always, he followed.

* * *

2.

In his dreams, they play cyvasse. He knows they are in his father’s solar, knows that outside lie the fountains and the pools, hears the insistent plops of the orange as they fall to the ground, but he knows also that they are completely alone, that there is no room but this one, no souls but their own, nothing but the table sitting between them and the pieces on the board.

She plays with her tongue peeking out from the corner of her mouth, her brow furrowed in concentration, and one by one she takes out his pieces with her dragon. He reaches for her hand just as she reaches for his last elephant, holding the soft skin of her wrist and turning it in his hand.

“Do you let me win?” She laughs, and he knows then it is certainly a dream because he cannot imagine Myrcella admitting he may have outsmarted her.

“No,” He lies, though he does.

She asks him something else, and suddenly she is the one gripping his hands, suddenly she is the one pulling him closer to her, and the table has gone and the room has melted away so nothing remains but them. The answer frightens him, and the fire in her eyes burns him, and he forces himself out of the dream, back to a reality where guards and walls and manners and blood lie between them, places where secrets can hide.

* * *

3.

He goes to a pillow house for the first time that year. It was expected of him, a rite of massage that all were to go through, the key to a door which stood between him and manhood, between him and some great secret hidden somewhere in bawdy jokes he laughed at but did not truly understand, burning hot and steady in the eyes of men when they drank and talked of women. Perros Blackmont took him to the whores at Planky Town. He argued Prince Doran will be less likely to find out, but Trystane did not worry for his father, worried for someone else. The whorehouse smelled of flowers and wine, smelled of sex and perfume and smoke, strong enough to make his stomach turn but when a woman with coiled hair and a mole on her cheek comes forward, presenting behind her a line of girls, dressed in gowns and shifts and nothing at all, he knows it is too late to turn back.

“My girls are here to serve you, my lords, whatever you desire will be yours,” The woman said, smiling coyly, and he looks at Perros, unsure.

His friend sighed wearily, though he was only a year older than Trystane, and put some coins in the woman’s hand.

“He’ll take the one on the left, I’ll take Teora,” He ordered, and they were taken to a room with many more girls, except these ones are not as beautiful and not as young, and there are men too, customers speaking in strange tongues and dressed in bright colors though the mark of wealth and nobility branded them all.

The girl,  _his_  girl, sat beside him, told him her name is Megga, tittered awkwardly when he asked her where she was from, lied and said Dorne. When she realized that he did not wish to converse, did not wish to listen to her and the other girls playing their harps, singing their songs, Trystane found himself being led by the hand through a hall of closed doors and up some stairs, to a room with a single candle burning and silk canopies covering the bed, a dulcimer in the corner and a bottle of wine open on a table. He stood in the center of the room, sheepishly running his fingers through his hair, truly looking at her for the first time.

She was no older than him, with black hair that fell in smooth waves down to her waist and eyes darker than his own, wide and bold. Her lips were red as though she had just feasted on strawberries, and though her dark eyebrows nearly met in the middle, somehow it only made her more beautiful. For a moment he wondered if she was nobleborn, but quickly realized that no lord would allow his daughter to end up in a place such as this. Her small body was hidden beneath a green shift made of material so thin he could make out her breasts, see her nipples, the triangle of hair that covered her mound.

Trystane looked away, as though struck.

Wine would be his courage, he decided, and he had emptied half the bottle alone before she moved towards him.

Smiling meekly, she knelt in front of him, her long fingers pulling apart the laces of his breeches and reaching into his smallclothes to take hold on his cock. He was hard in a few strokes, his body reacting despite himself though his stomach was aching, and suddenly her lips were wrapped around the tip of it, suckling and licking. He was too sensitive perhaps, or too drunk, and suddenly it was painful, uncomfortable, the sight of her and her dark hair, dark eyes, altogether obscene.

“No, stop,” Trystane blurted out, squirming away from her.

She stood up, unperturbed, wiping her mouth on the back of her hand.

“What would you like, my lord?” She asked, smiling like a doll, like a mask.

“Just get it over with,” He murmured, allowing her to take him to the bed this time, watching her lie down on the embroidered pillows, spreading her thighs and looking up at him expectedly.

He was drunk by then, utterly. Flustered, he climbed on top of her, reaching down to put herself inside her, cringing when his fingers touched her flesh, realizing that she had oiled herself beforehand. Trystane closed his eyes, though it was only a few thrusts before he came, spilling his seed on her thigh; he had found more satisfying releases working himself with his own hand in the privacy of his rooms. In the end, he did not feel any more the wizened man he thought he would suddenly be or any less the frightened boy who first walked through the doors of the whorehouse, only felt guilty, felt somehow unclean, somehow cruel.

He did not remember how he made his way out of the room, down the stairs and through the door, only he was suddenly standing in the stables. Perros grinned when he saw Trystane, clapping him on the back as they mounted their steeds and began their journey back to the Water Gardens. Even Ser Gascoyne, his sworn shield, was smiling cheekily, ruffling his hair as though he were a child once again. He should have been cheerful too, he supposed, but he imagined only dark eyes staring at him, a soft body in his hands, black curls twisted between his fingers. The eyes turned to green in his mind, the face to scars, to a crown of golden hair but the thought left him feeling all the worse, until he could take it no longer and he threw himself off his horse, falling to the ground on his hands and knees and emptying the contents of his stomach, bread and wine and bile, on the warm sand. Perros made some jape about liquid courage, smirking as he helped Trystane back in his saddle.

When they arrived, Myrcella was sitting by the fountains, watching the children swimming and playing, peeling a blood orange with her bare hands. Trystane took a step towards her, opening his mouth to greet her, but he thought of where he had been, of what he had done, and the words died on his lips.

* * *

4.

She wished to see the bazaars of Sunspear and the Water Gardens had become stifling, more of a prison than a haven. They had both outgrown the children who rode each other’s shoulders and held mock battles in the pools, began to yearn for other things, became adults in their own right. By then, Myrcella’s fourteenth nameday had passed, the date by which the Imp and Prince Doran had agreed to hold the wedding, her fifteenth and her sixteenth too gone too; by then she had flowered and grown into the body of a woman, and passed from an honored guest to a prisoner as Arianne stayed north playing the game of thrones with her dragon and Quentyn’s body turned to rot in his crypt.  
  
Trystane had been reaching towards Myrcella, to hand her a flower or perhaps brush a hair from her face, when the bolt ripped through his hand. In the blink of an eye he found himself pushed to the ground, mud filling his nostrils and mouth. Someone was screaming far away and all around them people ran, stalls were overturned and children cried. There was a hand pressing him down to the ground, and he thought it might have been Ser Gascoyne or Myrcella’s White Cloak.

She lay beside him, fear in her eyes but no tears.

“There’s blood on your face,” He found himself saying, “Are you alright?”

She nodded.

“I think I’m hurt,” He murmured.

Trystane turned his head awkwardly, following the line of blood on the ground beside him that led down to his hand.

There was no pain, though his hand was a mangled mess of bone and blood and flesh. It was disconcerting to say the least, to stare at his wound and yet feel nothing, strange and unsettling, winding his insides up into a tangled mess which did not know, could not choose, whether to scream and rage or lay still and weep. Myrcella put her hand on his face, drawing his eyes to her face instead.

“Don’t look at it,” She said, “Close your eyes.”

He did, and did not wake again until he was in a room at Sunspear, his hand a throbbing, aching, sphere of bandages so thick and heavy he could not even see his fingers. Myrcella sat at his bedside, frowning.

“Are you hurt?” Trystane croaked, his throat suddenly feeling as though he had swallowed a handful of rocks.

She shook her head, “No. The maester says your hand can be saved, so long as you keep it clean. It was a young guard, his first day at his post. He claimed it was an accident but he was sent to Ghaston Grey all the same, likely to await his execution.”

“It was only an accident, then?” He asked, sitting up clumsily in the bed, scratching his face with his unwounded hand and feeling the sharp stubble on his cheeks.

Myrcella was quiet for a beat too long and suddenly, wretchedly, she began weeping, her tears coming through in sharp sobs that shook her small body. She never fell apart in front of him, never allowed herself to express anything that fell too far beyond her usual calm contentment. And he had never seen a woman cry before, never seen  _anybody_  cry but the little children playing in the Water Gardens. This was a part of her he had never seen before, a part he did not know existed. It disturbed him that there was some piece of herself that she stored away from him, made him sad and jealous all at once.

“The quarrel was meant for me,” was all she said, “This is not my place.”

Trystane looked away, and hated himself for it.

* * *

5.

The seduction was slow, for seduction was what it was although he did not realize it until much later. It began with kisses on his cheek pressed too close to his lips, with gowns cut so low he could see the rise and fall of her breasts, with days spent at the sea where she would swim in nothing but a shift and pretend not to notice when he watched her from his window. It was all a game, he thought, until one night she reached beneath the table as they ate and put her hand on his thigh, rolling the fabric of his breeches between her fingers, painfully close to his cock. He grabbed her hand and for one torturous moment fought the urge to press it even closer, before feeling his father’s eyes on him from the dais and pushing it away roughly. She only smiled, grabbing a fig from his plate and popping it in her mouth. That was the night he went to her, convincing himself that he would speak to her, tell her it was improper, crude, torturous, to tease him so, tell her that familiarity would do no good, not when they did not know when ( _if_?) they would be married, not when she was being watched by half the court, by her White Cloak.

But she was lying in her bed, wrapped in a linen robe, her hair damp on her shoulders, the room smelling of rosewater and jasmine. In a few steps he was at her side, and then there was a warm hand on his neck and hot lips against his own. He did not know how much he missed kissing her until their tongues were moving against each other, clumsy as it was. She pulled him onto the bed where he fell on top of her, one of his legs wedged between her thighs. They stayed that way for a while, exploring each other’s mouths until he could feel his upper lip swelling from her bites and nips.

“We shouldn’t be doing this,” He heard himself say, even as he tore the robe away, even as he palmed her breasts and bucked his hips against hers.

She responded by pushing him on his back, straddling him like she might a horse. With one graceful movement the robe was in a puddle on the floor and she was naked before him. Trystane had heard it said that Cersei Lannister was the most beautiful woman in the Seven Kingdoms, but no woman could have compared to her daughter, her golden princess, shrouded in her lion’s mane, green eyes blazing with some fire that raged somewhere inside her, fueled by lust and passion but something frightening too, something he had seen in his cousins' eyes, something deep and dark that shone with guile and venom.

“Are you a boy?” She challenged, ripping through the laces of his breaches and drawing him out, “Or a man?”

Before he could think of an answer, she was guiding him inside her, all soft and warm and so tight he thought he might spend. If it pained her, she hid the pain well, and moved against him, rising and falling, her eyes fixed on his and her nails digging into his arms, holding him against the oak headboard, leaving him nothing to do but to watch her. He thought he might faint from the sight alone, her breasts moving with each thrust, her body flushed, toes curled and lips parted.

“I could die happy,” He murmured, panting and gasping for breath.

She laughed, not unkindly – “Let’s hope you don’t” – and was suddenly squeezing around him and before he could slide out of her, his seed was buried deep inside her.

Only then did she pull away, collapsing on the bed beside him, smiling so coolly she might as well have been greeting some courtier or speaking to a handmaiden. Euphoria came first – that she had chosen him, that perhaps she loved him, was willing to be his – followed quickly by alarm when she dodged his embrace and left the bed, to pick up her robe off the ground and pull it over her body.

“I am a princess born, deflowered,” She said, in a voice that was not her own, that was more of an order than a statement, “My honor must be restored.”

He thought of a Lannister cloak replaced by a Martell one, thought of her dressed in yellow and gold and orange, and wondered why they had not done this earlier.

* * *

6.

A babe with a tuft of black hair and fists the size of acorns slept against her breast, a child that was her sword and shield and armor, born of a conception that sealed a marriage that tied her to Dorne, kept her from the flames of the hungry dragons circling King’s Landing, from the hands of a Targaryen queen who had cleansed the Keep of Lannisters and who might have one day reached for her too.

Trystane imagined Myrcella as the Maiden for so many years, achingly beautiful and forever out of his reach, but when she became the Mother he realized her true form lay in the Warrior, hidden inside a girl who had not roared or stormed but who was forever clawing, digging her way out of a crypt. He stood from his seat by the window and walked towards them, caressing the soft skin at the crown of his daughter’s head.

“I love you,” He murmured, looking up afterwards to Myrcella’s face, her eyes watching him carefully.

“I know,” She said, and somehow that was enough.


End file.
